“I want adventure in the great wide somewhere!” Belle sings it to us directly. She gets her adventure, but while the castle is certainly more than the provincial life she feared, being confined there is not a great wide open space. When she leaves the castle to go to her father, she has a second adventure, but again this isn’t a great wide somewhere. She can’t have both of the things she asks for, apparently.
Also notice how she complains that nothing changes in the quiet town where every day is like the one before and then ends up in a castle where everything has been the same day after day for years. In this case, however, she herself brings the change she wants and makes everything different.
What does he want?
It isn’t said directly, but apparently more than being human again the Beast wants to lash out and punish others for his unhappiness. He might want to be human, but he has no hope that it can happen and assumes it never will, so being angry at the world is all there is, along with being angry at himself for causing this mess. My own speculation is that while he doubtless started out blaming everything and everyone but himself, over the years he’s come to admit to himself that his own behavior led the enchantress to cast the spell, and he’s owned up to his own role in his misfortune. But that’s not what will break the spell, so he’s still always ready to spread his misery to anyone in striking range.
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How can she be so casual about a sheep chewing the corner off a page in her book? What is wrong with you, Belle? How can you love books and not care what happens to the pages? In my mind she swipes the book away and frowns sternly just before the sheep can take a bite.
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I’m uncomfortable every time I see a movie with wolf scenes like this film has. Philippe the horse might have something to fear, but basically wolves don’t attack human beings without a reason like rabies or the human is violently threatening the pack. I’ve heard that European wolves may have been less hesitant to attack people than U.S. wolves are, but scenes like this are essentially Medieval anti-wolf propaganda.
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Things I never noticed before:
• For all the talk of how much Gaston is admired and adored, at the start of the story everybody pretty much ignores his pleading for them to get out of his way. He’s not more important than their own business (or gossip).
• The Beast is in body a beast. He’s gigantic, has fangs, has massive paws with ravaging claws. But by all appearances he doesn’t physically harm Maurice in the slightest. He has the power to inflict a nightmarish mauling, but instead places the man in a cell uninjured.
• “I have been burned by you before!”
• The castle staff have been living under this spell for ten years and most days there is nothing to do but lie around idle. I’ve watched Beauty and the Beast several times, and heard “Be Our Guest” even more, but I had not really listened to these lines. Now I finally hear how miserable their lives must be in this near-vacant castle with only the Beast to feed, and the rest of the day (every day) reduced to sheer emptiness.
• Although we the audience have seen the prologue, Belle has not. For all she knows, the Beast has been a beast his entire life. She’s left to figure out for herself that he was once human.
• When Belle sneaks into the west wing of the castle, she’s being spectacularly rude. The enchanted staff have just gone out of their way to break rules for her, and she repays them by slipping off into the one part of the castle she knows she’s not allowed into and where Cogsworth and Lumiere have just begged her not to go. Worse, when she gets into the Beast’s torn-up room and sees the flower in a glass case, she goes right over and takes the case away! It’s the one precious item in a devastated room that gets careful treatment (along with the hand mirror beside it), but she doesn’t respect the painfully obvious intention to keep this flower safe. Her curiosity has led her past common decency and good sense.
• In the song “Something There,” the Beast entertains (though quickly dismisses) the idea that Belle might now care for him. It could be that he is finally coming to see something in himself he hasn’t seen before (or saw only, as a human, in an entitled, privileged, false way): that he is someone worth loving.
• At the end of the movie, Mrs. Potts assures Chip the couple will live happily ever after, but she isn’t saying this to the audience, or not to all of the audience. She’s saying this to her son, because of course this is how you answer a small child; yet the rest of us don’t have to imagine things are as simple as that in a relationship.
• The closing credits have a couple of voice credits for characters labeled “Bimbette.” No. No. No. Ugh.
For a sideways look at the 2017 live-action remake, see here.
I watched most of these discs before I was in the habit of writing comments to post here, and I’ve got a mountain of other movies to go through before I’ll be rewatching these (although I surely will rewatch them). So I won’t be doing a full post on them any time soon, but I will make a few quick comments from memory even though the material isn’t fresh on my mind.
More of the shelf has filled in since I took this photo, but those films already have their own entries.
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The Gold Rush (1925/1942)
A decent DVD/blu-ray of The Gold Rush will include both the original silent version and the later rerelease with voiceover. Both are legitimate versions of the film; Charlie Chaplin not only supplied the voice narrating the rerelease, he also carefully decided on and placed all the music used (maybe wrote some of the score himself? I can’t fully recall what those bonus features said). But for me the original is the one to turn to. I for one am much more entertained by a silent movie left silent than a silent movie with narration laid on top of it where it wasn’t meant to have any.
The voiceover version is still a pleasure, though, because the essence of the original is still there. Chaplin updated the silent film without ruining it, because he knew the film and what made it wonderful, and in any case the rerelease kept the movie (and Chaplin’s renown) in the public imagination and is probably why we can still see the original at all.
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Metropolis (1927)
Metropolis was pretty long when first released but was trimmed considerably for wider distribution, and the cut scenes were long believed to be lost; much of the cut material has been rediscovered in some degree of watchability. The film is a milestone not only in special effects but also in the history of film preservation, one of the early occasions when people realized there was a need to preserve.
I’ve seen this film in three different renditions: two or three times in the shortened once-standard edit; a version with some bits restored; and now the most-scenes-restored-sorta version. The material (re-)added for the longest version makes the story much more coherent, notably providing a reason for the scientist to make his robot look like this woman. I’d have to watch it again to recall whether any particular restored bits slow things down too much, but my recollection is that the plot is greatly improved.
The movie in any of the available cuts has an obvious socialist message of “it’s bad for callous rich people to exploit the working class,” but the solution given is not “revolt and take over” (we see how a careless revolution can endanger workers’ own families), the answer is “you need understanding and feeling between the classes.” Still it’s mainly the upper class that needs to do the work of looking and listening and adapting.
The film is German, but the scenes of rich people partying while the world is more or less ending remind me of what I know of the U.S. during the Roaring Twenties and the Stock Market Crash.
By today’s standards Metropolis can seem simplistic or naive—or, let’s say, unsubtle—but it was a thundering groundbreaker of science fiction and cultural commentary in the movies.
It’s my understanding that Hitchcock didn’t want to follow the novel faithfully, but the producers forced him to—except in one critical point which the morals office would not have tolerated (but Hitchcock probably would have preferred).
I might not even know who Daphne du Maurier was if not for this movie. Because the film is so good I read the novel, and was rather surprised by that important difference.
I think the constraints on Hitchcock in this case resulted in a much better film than he would’ve given us if left to his own devices.
The female lead of the story is hard to cast and play. If she’s too mousy we won’t believe she would catch Maxim’s notice or dare to go around with him at the resort, but if she’s too lively we won’t believe she’ll be so intimidated by Mrs. Danvers.
Maxim is kind of a jerk. It’s true that the man of the estate is not going to have a lot of in-depth interaction with the housekeeper, certainly compared to his wife; and as a product of his class he will take it for granted that you simply give orders to servants and they carry them out. But he can’t be this oblivious to what’s happening or this unaware of his housekeeper’s personal character. Surely on some level he knows his new wife is being bullied. He even sees first-hand in the broken-figurine incident that she’s afraid of Danvers. He consciously chose someone the opposite of the imposing, self-assertive, rule-making Rebecca, which means at the very least he should be aware she’s unprepared for her new position. Is Maxim enjoying the situation, perhaps amused by his inept wife’s childish insecurity? Does he like seeing her flounder? It’s hard to think ill of anyone played by Laurence Olivier, but still.
This film is laden with nonverbal signals, dripping with meaning in looks and gestures and silent interactions between people.
As an aside, we also see a proper response to blackmail.
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The Philadelphia Story (1940)
“Shall we flip a coin?”
“Why didn’t you sell tickets?!?”
In addition to smart, sharp one-liners, three Hollywood greats colliding, a plot richer than you’d think a “screwball comedy” would have, a sassy younger sister eager to see trouble, and overall fun expertly dancing with overall drama, it always strikes me that in an era when drunkenness was often a source of cheap humor, this film treats Dex’s alcoholism quite seriously. He himself delivers the occasional remark about his “glorious thirst,” but it’s unmistakably sarcasm from a place of his own hard experience. Other characters might be treated lightly when they indulge too much, but Dex’s drinking is a problem and he knows it and he explicitly turns down every bit of alcohol offered to him, because it’s essential to his future that he stays sober, no exceptions.
Also, from multiple angles: two wrongs don’t make a right, and being partly right doesn’t make you wholly right.
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Cat People (1942)
As I understand it, the director, Jacques Tourneur, did not want this film to have a visible monster at all, but the higher-ups (studio or producers) insisted on having a cat onscreen in the office-room attack scene, and would’ve preferred a lot more of the same. In this case I don’t think the movie is harmed by that profit-conscious interference. For me Cat People has exactly the right balance: plenty of suspense, lots left to the imagination, a focus on the psychological effects of thinking you might be a killer whether you really are or not, and a higher standard of storytelling than repeatedly having people scream while a costume-creature attacks them, and it does all this without sitting on the fence of “Is she or isn’t she, make your own interpretation!” To me there is just the right amount of monster, taking a position but showing enormous restraint.
(That can’t be said of the 1982 remake, which shrugs aside story in favor of the attack gimmick and laughable levels of nudity. Although the pool sequence is still extremely effective.)
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Curse of the Cat People (1944)
This film refuses to be distracted by the pull of the title monster. It is definitely a sequel to Cat People but has nothing to do with people turning into cats. Curse knows what it means to do and it does it, no matter what the studio executives undoubtedly wanted it to do. I’m glad the original had a touch of cat monster in it, and also glad the filmmakers didn’t allow anyone to force monsters into the sequel. (Yes, there is the question of a ghost, but it isn’t here to threaten or frighten, and there are no human-feline transformations.)
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Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Good songs, an enjoyable story, the importance of family, childhood mischief, Judy Garland.
At a glance, this movie might be seen as “well-to-do white families having wholesome fun,” but the parts about the younger daughters are based on a real person’s autobiography and add a certain layer of complexity regarding children’s lives. Traffic-accident injuries, morbid games with dolls, kids running loose on the streets Halloween night playing pranks—still nothing shocking, but showing more rough edges to childhood than Hollywood musicals would usually acknowledge.
The film’s origin in an autobiography is also why you seem to have two main characters—Tootie comes from the book and lives out those adventures, while Esther was created to pull in audiences and let Judy Garland do what she could do so well.
From the bonus features I learned there was a scene cut following the trolley song showing Judy Garland’s character and her love interest at the fair, and I suspect it would’ve made better sense of a few little snippets elsewhere in the film if they’d left that in. But, so be it.
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The Inspector General (1949)
Basically Danny Kaye plays somebody who wanders into town and is mistaken for an important dignitary. This gains him a lot of perks but also means certain people want to kill him. I remember poison, assassins, corrupt local officials, and people locked in boxes.
In college a friend and I had a great time watching this movie. Apart from that association I’m not sure a physical copy would have a place on my shelf, though it is fun and worth a watch. After all, it’s Danny Kaye.
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All About Eve (1950)
Bette Davis, willing to play an actress unwilling to admit she can no longer play young women.
We see a skilled manipulator who does quite well using other women but makes critical misjudgements of two men.
The story is driven by the fact that Margo is too old to play twenty-year-olds, and yet that story is largely about Margo growing up and becoming an adult. She has to find her maturity in order to relate to herself, her career, and her would-be husband.
It’s a time when a columnist had the power to create or end careers.
Addison DeWitt is a truly awful person. He appears calm, cool, and sophisticated throughout—until someone looks down on him, and his violent reaction shows how insecure and fragile he really is. He’s a bully who exercises power over people to prove to himself he’s important. Of course he writes about The Stage and not The Screen, but I’ve always associated the character with gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who could ruin a Hollywood career with a few paragraphs, in addition to Walter Winchell. (The movie was released in 1950, so McCarthyism was barely getting underway and wasn’t the issue here.)
Oh yeah, Marilyn Monroe has a brief part here too, and she’s pretty funny.
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Singin in the Rain (1952)
This film is so, so, so, much fun. Singing! Dancing! Laughing! Hijinks! Satire of the movie business! Romance! Charm! Charisma! Toeses! Everything about it is just about perfect, except—sorry, Gene Kelly devotees—the long, long, long dance sequence of Kelly’s character-within-a-character-outside-a-character looking for a job in New York. Yes, yes, I know it’s a Gene Kelly movie so people wanted to see him dance, but this is still a movie and it has a plot and a story which skids to a complete and jarring halt when this sequence intrudes with a premise that makes no sense. (This saves The Duelling Cavalier how exactly? Really?) I love this movie dearly and when I watch it I fast-forward through the whole nine(?) minutes of the hoofer doing “Gotta Dance” at cardboard talent agencies.
But oh the rest of it makes me happy.
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Roman Holiday (1953)
Audrey Hepburn, ah. A timeless tale—meaning you’ve seen the premise elsewhere—but timelessly charming and moving. She thinks she’s fooling them, playing normal young woman, but she isn’t, although she is winning them over. Some things can’t be, and she has to give things up and they choose to give things up, and without saying all the words they all understand. She’s perfect for the role—European but of undefinable nationality; looking young enough to try something stupid but old enough she’s been weighted with responsibility; luminously beautiful as a princess “should” be, yet not so glamorous or stately she couldn’t walk through Rome unidentified; innocent and sophisticated at the same time, believable in welcoming dignitaries and in eating gelato on the street.
And I can’t forget to note the glories of having this filmed on location: real Rome, tall and ancient all around the actors, nearly tangible as you watch.
You’ll hear it called “the greatest Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made,” which sounds about right except it isn’t really fair to the actual director, Stanley Donen.
I love the theme music by Henry Mancini and find myself clicking it out with my tongue probably once a week or more (TOK-tok-tok t’tok-tok-t’tok-tok).
Audrey Hepburn is a delight as always. Cary Grant is wonderful as usual (even if he needs to be twenty/thirty years younger for this role).
Mystery, suspense, humor, one-liners, danger, lies, double-crosses, a missing fortune, Hepburn playing a character stretched and strained until she doesn’t know which end is up, and naturally that infectious theme: it gets almost everything right.
In some bonus feature somewhere I heard Audrey Hepburn complain that one of the funniest lines in the movie—one of hers—is stepped on by the instrumentation at the very, very, very end, and I have to agree with her. If only they’d waited two more seconds and let her words come through cleanly!
“He’s a very nice prince” follows close on the heels of another statement about “nice,” but you might not think of that the first time you hear it.
“Wanting a ball isn’t wanting a prince.”
“You may know what you need, but to get what you want, better see that you keep what you have!”
People change in the woods; the changes might not always be good.
“You will never love someone else’s child the way you love your own,” says Cinderella’s stepmother, who will later take a knife to her own daughters.
“How do you know who you are if you don’t know what you want?”
“Children can only grow from something you love to something you lose.”
“No one is alone”—but in reality, to have others on your side takes a choice, from them.
Be careful the tale you tell: the effects of your parenting can last longer than you realize, whether you’ve told your daughter to be nice and good, abandoned your son, cursed your daughter if she breaks a rule, or made your son feel he’s not good enough.
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At the start of Into the Woods we’re introduced to a group of wishes: Jack wishes Milky White would give milk, Jack’s mother wishes her son were not a fool and for food and money to live, the baker and his wife wish to have a child, the witch wants to be young and beautiful again, and Cinderella wishes . . . to go to the festival.
Cinderella’s wish is trivial in the context of her life: she’s trapped in misery, an object of exploitation and of physical, mental, and emotional abuse (as a result of her father’s bad decisions, as it happens). She visits the grave of her mother, who sings, “Do you know what you wish? Are you certain what you wish is what you want?”
Despite that question, when given the choice for a wish, still Cinderella chooses to go to the festival.
There’s no sign she has thought of the festival as anything more than a brief diversion from her misery (and either way, she could’ve just asked for the new life directly). Why isn’t she asking to be taken away from her awful environment or wishing for some sort of lasting relief? Can she not imagine herself as anything more than other people’s tool? Has she been made to believe this is all she’s worth? Tragically, she seems to have no dream beyond looking in on someone else’s privileged life.
Later she asks how you know who you are if you don’t know what you want.
She doesn’t know what she wants, or can’t articulate it, and so she makes a stupid, small wish when she could’ve had much more.
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In Into the Woods, Jack is a central character, and we’re likely to think about his wishes, his desires, but in the prologue song his mother also voices wishes, and the first one is “I wish my son were not a fool.” This is the wish that gets granted, but at a very high price.
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The consequences of one person’s actions ripple out and out—and combine with ripples from other people’s actions in ways no one expected.
How are you to know what will come of what you do? How much responsibility do you bear for what you didn’t foresee, and will you accept it?
“You move just a finger / Say the slightest word / Something’s bound to linger / Be heard. / No one acts alone. / Careful! / No one is alone.”
No matter what you do, children won’t listen; be careful what you do, children will listen; be careful what you wish, wishes are children.
I hadn’t seen this prequel before, and I went in fully expecting it to be awful. I never would have watched it at all except that it’s on the blu-ray of Return to the Sea, which I knew I wanted. And yet, it’s actually a lot of fun.
Okay, I spent half the movie/special worrying it would end with Marina being transformed into Ursula, which would be wrong for three reasons: (1) her conflict with Triton ought to be far back in time, much longer ago than this story takes place; (2) if she had this kind of rivalry with Sebastian, she wouldn’t have been so blasé about him being in the cavern when Ariel signed the contract in Little Mermaid; (3) it’s better moviemaking to give the audience a new villain instead of danger always coming from the same place, and it’s weak moviemaking to think you need to cram everything from the original into the prequel.
I feel like I’ve seen the “he banned all music” trope just a few too many times. I love Sound of Music, but I don’t want to see that same device played out again and again in animated stories.
On the other hand, here that trope allows us to see the underground sing-easy, introduced in a magnificent scene.
Other good things:
The song from Ariel’s childhood is “Endless Sky,” something you can’t experience under the sea.
We know why Triton is so intense about Ariel staying away from the surface. It didn’t necessarily need more explanation, but Ariel’s Beginning deepens our understanding of his feelings.
Triton is just as impulsive and hyperreactive as he was in The Little Mermaid, but missing here is his regret and doubt immediately after. This is not a flaw in the script: he has not yet learned to question his own behavior.
Ariel’s sisters got short-changed in the original Little Mermaid. They help set up the concert problem, and she mentions them a single time when weighing whether or not to sign Ursula’s contract, and that’s pretty much all that’s done with them. Poking their heads out of the water at the end, they could just be random merfolk coming to watch the princess. Which is to say, you could write them out of the story and it wouldn’t change anything except that unrelated court singers would have to do the concert lead-in. We don’t see much evidence that Ariel is connected to them the way you would be if you grew up with sisters. Ariel’s Beginning remedies that, and so deepens the effect of Ariel’s decisions in the original film.
Benjamin is a fun character.
The songs are better here than in Return to the Sea.
Ariel’s “I Remember” number is right on target that songs help us remember feelings we had and stir up things we’d forgotten, and we value music for that very reason. It’s why Triton has banned music, and why Ariel now wants it back.
“—he was a BAD boy!”
“She really can’t dance.”
“. . . but high enough so they can’t see the disdain on my face.”
Watching Marina bask in her triumph is great fun. Watching her do just about anything in this movie is fun.
To my surprise, this movie/special avoids just about all the things that make a direct-to-video sequel rubbish.
I’ve decided that Flounder got his name from the guys at the Catfish Club, and it was affectionate but not a compliment.
Every time I see this cover I start to whistle “Under the Sea.”
It’s mentioned a lot in DVD extras and the like, but casual post–Gen X viewers may not realize how revolutionary The Little Mermaid was in U.S. animation when it came out.* In the 1980s animated movies were still being made—Secret of NIMH, Last Unicorn, American Tail, Disney’s own Oliver and Company—but they weren’t huge, and Disney was more engaged with making live-action films and rereleasing past glories than with creating new animation.
The idea of “the Disney princess” did not exist. Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty were around, but they weren’t viewed as a collective franchise or thought of as a group beyond the general fact that all three were in Disney movies. Now, after a long spell of modest efforts, Disney went back to the formula of fairy tale + songs, and The Little Mermaid became an enormous success, effectively launching all the princess films that followed, from Beauty and the Beast to Pocahontas on through Moana. Animation from other studios came hurrying after in the wake.
Disney animated movies had always had songs, but this time the songs took on a new dimension. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken brought in more of the sensibility of musical theatre, and transformed what the animated musical looked like. Oliver and Company—its production overlapped with that of Little Mermaid—was also a musical, but something about it didn’t catch. Little Mermaid got into the country’s heart.
This is a wonderful, moving film, combining dynamic animation, beautiful music, and characters with depth and complexity, a film that went light years beyond the things that had come before it in this country. It soared off the screen in a way we weren’t prepared for.
* I specify U.S. animation, because despite Battle of the Planets, Star Blazers, and Robotech, general U.S. culture wasn’t paying attention to the animation coming out of Japan.
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I had a problem the first time I saw Little Mermaid, though: I knew how the story was supposed to end, and I felt betrayed because they changed the beauty of the original story’s conclusion. After all, it’s only logical that if you’re to choose a tragedy, you must be okay with a heartbreaking ending. Keeping the unhappy ending seems unthinkable now, but at the time it actually felt possible to me—naive perhaps, but also a sign that the movie existed at a truly transitional moment, with the old Disney fairy-tales long past, and the modern stream not yet imagined. I knew this film was a new thing, although it wasn’t quite as groundbreaking as that would have been.
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Ariel is an active princess who goes out and pursues her desires. She has choices, and she makes them herself, good and bad. The entire plot moves because she is chasing her dreams and fantasies, and if she had been a passive, obedient daughter, the story would consist of a successful debut concert and Eric’s ship sinking, which she would not care about even if she knew of it, because it would be just another shipwreck she had no connection to.
I think one of the main reasons this film had such an impact is that as an audience we care deeply about Ariel, something that might be traced largely to a single song. “Part of Your World” brings together lyrics, instruments, vocal performance, and animation into a sequence of almost tangible longing. From the careful, steady pacing to the breathiness of certain lines to the size of her eyes and the way she literally reaches upward to the world she can’t have, it all brings you into her yearning so you can feel what she feels (and oh-so-naturally slips in a phrase you might not notice at the time or think about even after you know what happens later: “What would I give—?”).
Ariel’s father Triton does harsh things that hurt her but immediately regrets losing his temper and second-guesses his impulsive actions. He doesn’t rage over nothing, but he overreacts, then sees that he overreacted and blames himself. He acts like he has all the answers, but when he has time to think, he realizes he doesn’t. His negative actions drive Ariel forward in the plot, but he isn’t a villain. And when the moment comes to save Ariel, he takes her place just as impulsively and without concern for anything but her.
Ursula the sea witch is intelligent, devious, and crafty. More than that, she’s formidable. She thinks several steps ahead and has an old feud with Triton that the storyline only skims but must have been festering for years. You might suspect that all the merfolk she’s cheated over this time have in some way been jabs to get back at Triton, taking his people away from him whenever she can. The movie’s main character is only a pawn in Ursula’s own tale; she uses Ariel as a tool to achieve something else and near the end directly tells her, “It’s not you I’m after.” Ursula’s grievance and resentment has made her keen and meticulous instead of impulsive and reckless; in temperament she is the exact opposite of Triton. Which is probably why she finally gets the better of him. (Note that Triton has no hand in defeating her.)
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We should not overlook the sheer daring of deciding to make a musical, establishing within the story that the main character has a beautiful singing voice, and then making that character voiceless for half the movie.
The first time I saw a picture of what actual flounders look like, I was first disgusted and second confused, because there was no way Flounder was a flounder, no matter how much you prettify an ugly fish for animation. But of course, he isn’t a flounder, it’s just his name, inexplicably. This is a lot like naming your horse Moose, or calling your dog Hyena. But did Ariel name him or did his mother or did he name himself? I think we should know that.
I wonder, was this the last Disney fairy-tale where the villain was deliberately killed by one of the good guys? Usually they fall by accident or some natural disaster overtakes them.
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Comics Scene magazine, issue 11 (Feb. 1990)
I recently read an article from an issue of Comics Scene—which, as you can see, covered animation as well as comics—about The Little Mermaid. The cover date is Feb 1990, but it would’ve been published a little earlier; this would’ve been on sale while the movie was in theaters, and the article written before that. The people being interviewed couldn’t be sure how successful the movie would be, and it’s funny to see the co-director feeling a need to clarify that Ariel is the name of the main character.
I think my favorite part of the article is this little gem about Ursula:
“Inky, slinky Ursula is voiced by Pat Carroll, who envisions the character as part Shakespearean actress, with all the requisite theatricality, and part used car saleswoman.”
